Walter Robinson

“Listen to everything that is said, look at everything that is done, and do what you want.”

—Matisse

Benign king of hi-lo country, Walter Robinson learnt a key lesson from his mentor Mr. Warhol: just let yourself love the world around you, all that you survey, from highest museum masterpiece to lowest gutter burger wrapper, and the world will love you back. A near-mythic figure of downtown Manhattan lore, deep grounded in the grungy glory of that bankrupt 1970s city, Robinson has played many parts, appearing as everything from bar room buccaneer worthy of Bukowski to art magazine editor in a grey flannel suit.

But above all he has painted; at first with amusement and irony, a witty skit on kitsch, a wry riff on an almost exhausted form, playing with Pop art like a cat with a tired mouse. But “painting” is a sneaky virus, and once it has infected the innocent artist it becomes addictive, obsessive, a siren singing its own seduction. After decades of serving this compulsive master even the most sworn devotee of “the sign” is bound to find themselves, like Robinson, a devotee of paint itself. Let us remember that Robinson’s first solo show was with Metro Pictures in 1982, 40 years ago, and over so long an apprenticeship it is near impossible to stop oneself from becoming increasingly integrated, steadily skilled, an inevitable virtuoso.

Robinson has an unusual advantage, for rather than the old French dictum of “stupid as a painter” he actually knows everything there is to know about art, from most ancient cave carvings to very latest fashion of 2021. Not only did he author a populist history of art, he also worked for many years as a wise and witty critic, not least as a founder of the seminal journal Art-Rite and later as editor of Artnet Magazine. As such he measured with passion and precision every angle in contemporary art, even inventing his own celebrated term, “Zombie Formalism.” Thus Robinson came to know, both instinctively as artist and critically as observer, every possible way of making art today, every single goal and gambit. Then he happily carried on with his own signature painting, same as it ever was, just more and more accomplished.

Artists often unconsciously echo the art of the year of their birth, their own aesthetic birthright, and Robinson, born in 1950, seems to have been umbilically seeped in the visual culture of that era; ambiotically afloat in the spectacle of this epoch, the final years when those Mad Men agencies brought traditional illustration to its pictorial heights. Coming of age in New York’s hall of mirrors of ultra-irony, Robinson seemed to be celebrating and sabotaging the all-American values embodied in such graphic styles, a politically radical “détournement” of the aspirational paradise of postwar consumerism. Although Robinson’s painting at that time blossomed forth from the Fauvist jungle of East Village Wild Style, it was also closely aligned with the “appropriation” and “simulacra” of his more conceptual contemporaries.

As this current exhibition, his first in France, makes clear, Robinson still stealthily advances as a satirical saboteur of the sign, though his actual painting now demonstrates a worryingly accomplished bravura dash. Thus his roll of green dollars sparks immediate comparison to Manet’s famous asparagus, his “salad” is an outrageous exercise in Abstract Expressionist compositional free-fall, and his shirts, tactile and tasty, are extended puns on Neo-Geo gendered as a peculiarly pressed and pinned masculinity.

Particularly poignant is Robinson’s chef d’oeuvre, Vietnam, a painting made this year, which pays homage to the complex political history which fatally links that country to both France and the USA. This painting also plays on the very French, highly politicised Pop of Nouvelle Figuration, an homage of sorts to the engagé painters of Mai ’68, proving Robinson more than just the ultimate exponent of pure Americana. It is also funny and sexy, both of which are still, just, good things.

A delicious thing to eat, a cheeseburger is probably bad for you and even worse for the environment — a perfect American subject. France especially has fought a long battle against fatally attractive fast food and Coca-Cola, but who can refuse the sheer “thingness” of the thing, worthy of Francis Ponge or Merleau-Ponty, chunky, greasy, melting before us yet indomitably there.

We can read Robinson’s subjects as symbols in a hermeneutics of attraction and repulsion: what is good for us, salad; what is dangerous, cheeseburger; and what is both vulgar yet imaginary, actual cash, a spring-roll of green dollars. Painting has always been about desire, the pleasure the artist tries to capture transmuted alchemically into the pleasure of the viewer. Robinson understands that such haptic desires and satisfactions come with a dangerous undertow, the paradoxical pull of what we do not like or want, magnetically drawing us toward our own final implication.

—Adrian Dannatt, Amagansett, October 2021

Walter Robinson is a New York painter and art critic. He was born in 1950 and has lived and worked in New York City since 1968. As an art writer, Robinson is perhaps most celebrated for coining the term «zombie formalism» during a stint as columnist for Artspace.

In 1973 he launched Art-Rite magazine with two collaborators, publishing irregularly until 1977. During the same period he was a co-founder of Printed Matter, and somewhat later served as a correspondent for the cable TV show “Art TV Gallery Beat.” Robinson also wrote for Art in America, Artspace, the East Village Eye and the Observer. In 1996, he became founding editor of Artnet Magazine, a post he held until 2012.

He began exhibiting his paintings in earnest with Collaborative Projects, participating in “The Real Estate Show” and “The Times Square Show” in 1980. In 1982 he had his first exhibition with Metro Pictures, and later showed at galleries in the East Village and elsewhere. A retrospective of his paintings opened at Illinois State University in Normal, IL in 2014, traveling to the Galleries at Moore in Philadelphia, and debuting the new Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Soho in 2016. In 2017 his work was included in “Fast Forward: Work from the 1980s” at the Whitney Museum. In 2020 he had exhibitions at Galleria Mazzoli in Modena and Galerie Sébastien Bertrand in Geneva.